I Introduction
At the opening of Book 4 of Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica, we find both divine and human characters in an unusual state of aporia as to where their epic is headed. At the end of the previous book, Juno has caused her hated stepson Hercules to abandon the Argonauts’ expedition, leaving the crew without its greatest hero. As they continue to Colchis, Hercules’ forlorn companions must venture into the unknown without their greatest monster-fighter on board.
Diverging from his predecessor Apollonius, Valerius marks this moment as a plot twist that takes not only the Argonauts, but even the gods, by surprise — like his audience, they expect a different version of this traditional story.Footnote 1 Looking down from Olympus, Hercules’ father Jupiter objects both to his son’s suffering and, on poetic grounds, to the havoc that Juno has wreaked in terms of the epic plot (V.F. 4.4–13):
atque ea non oculis diuum pater amplius aequis
sustinuit natique pios miseratus amores
Iunonem ardenti trepidam grauis increpat ira:
‘ut noua nunc tacito <te> pectore gaudia tollunt:
haeret inops solisque furit Tirynthius oris,
at comite immemores Minyae facilesque relicto
alta tenent. sic Iuno ducem fouet anxia curis
Aesonium, sic arma uiro sociosque ministrat …
… rerum mihi firma potestas.
i, Furias Veneremque moue …’
No longer could the father of the gods bear these sights with impartial eyes, and, pitying his son’s loyal love, he sternly chastised fearful Juno with blazing anger, ‘So now new joys spring up in your silent heart! The hero of Tiryns is stuck helpless and rages on the deserted shores, while, forgetful of their comrade and content to leave him behind, the Minyae take to the seas. So anxious Juno cares for her Aesonian leader, so she provides arms and companions for the man! … my authority over these affairs is unmoved. Go, rouse the Furies and Venus …’Footnote 2
Jupiter couches his reprimand in terms of the Argonautica’s diversion from the model of the Aeneid — is this your version of arma uirumque?Footnote 3 For those left behind, Hercules’ absence seems to suggest that they will no longer be able to carry out their intended storyline: without arms and the man, Hercules, to help Valerius’ leading man, Jason — the uir here referenced — this can be no true Vergilian epic.Footnote 4
In the tradition of medial proems, however, Jupiter’s intervention signals a departure not just in the poem’s content, but also in the spirit in which it is carried out.Footnote 5 Even as he chastises her, Jupiter quotes the Vergilian Juno’s own words as she plots to take down Aeneas and his Trojans in Aeneid 7 (Aen. 7.310–12):
‘quod si mea numina non sunt
magna satis, dubitem haud equidem implorare quod usquam est:
flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta mouebo.’
‘Because if my powers are not great enough, I will not hesitate to entreat them wherever I can: if I am not able to sway the gods above, I will rouse hell.’
History repeats itself indeed: as in the Aeneid, Jupiter’s sister-wife is marshalling her furial powers to take over his intended narrative. In some sense, Jupiter vocalises the poet’s own surprise at how his poetic expectations have been subverted, drawing his audience’s attention to the kind of arma that Juno will supply to this new epic uir.Footnote 6 As Conte discusses, medial proems offer a space for poets to express their authorial self-consciousness:Footnote 7 Valerius here signals that it is by and through dialogue with the Aeneid that his narrative will progress.
In the wake of Hercules’ disappearance, his companions cannot agree on the best course of action. On one hand, the majority of the crew, led by the helmsman Tiphys and the hero Meleager, argue that they must press on, honouring Hercules’ amor rerum while leaving the man himself behind. On the other, Hercules’ comrade-in-arms, Telamon, advocates waiting: not only do they need their greatest hero, he says, but it is also a matter of honour and loyalty.
In this paper, I use the debate over Hercules’ abandonment as a case study for Valerius’ engagement with the ideological message of the Aeneid, namely, Vergil’s celebration of the fides, pietas and magnanimitas of his hero as the foundation on which (Augustan) Roman history was built. While the Aeneid itself is far from uncomplicated in its political outlook, for the Flavian poets Vergil provides a model for the interaction of epic, politics and ethical imprimatur. By adopting the language of Vergilian tradition and reusing it in a context of internal dissension, Valerius’ Argonauts show how these values may be complicated by echoes of civil war.
This is true not only of the Argonautica’s content, but also of its political engagement. Valerius’ evocation of the Aeneid as his epic exemplar parallels a similar intertextual aemulatio taking place in the Flavian political narrative, interrogating how Vespasian’s use of Augustan imagery replicates the pitfalls of Augustus’ own questionable evocation of Republican values. As Vespasian and his heirs sought to establish their legitimacy in the wake of 69 c.e., they invoked Augustus as a model for their rise and rule.Footnote 8 And throughout the Argonautica Valerius couches his poem as a Vergilian story of foundation, of the opening of the seas and the dawn of Jupiter’s reign. Asserting its ‘firstness’ from the very first line (V.F. 1.1–2: prima deum magnis canimus freta peruia natis/fatidicamque ratem; ‘I sing of the straits first traversed by the great sons of the gods and of the fate-speaking ship’), Valerius aligns the Argonauts’ heroic enterprise with the Flavian imperial project (V.F. 1.7–9):Footnote 9
tuque o, pelagi cui maior aperti
fama, Caledonius postquam tua carbasa uexit
oceanus Phrygios prius indignatus Iulos …
And you, who win the greater glory of the open sea, after the Caledonian ocean bore your sails, that sea which had previously spurned the Phrygian Julii …
Valerius throws down the gauntlet of epic voyages, claiming that this voyage — and this dynasty — will usher in an age beyond the reach of Augustus and his heirs, the Phrygii Iulii whose descent from Trojan Aeneas Vergil had celebrated. Poet and principes both engage in a form of heroic aemulatio, the ambition to match and surpass the achievements of earlier generations.
But even as Valerius’ crew embarks en route to Colchis and the Jovian future, Valerius stages Hercules’ disappearance as that of a father-figure, the object of his companions’ epic emulation.Footnote 10 As for his heroes, so too for the poet: in losing Hercules, Valerius performs a loss of continuity with the world of Vergilian epic that Hercules represents. From Valerius’ vantage point, the Aeneid’s hopeful outlook was necessarily muddied by the flawed inheritance of Augustus’ heirs and the bloody competing claims of 69 c.e.
Recent scholarship has brought out the importance of the episode for Valerius’ characterisation of his protagonists and response to his historical moment.Footnote 11 As Stover points out, however, its intertextual significance has yet to be fully addressed. By setting Valerius’ Vergilian framing in dialogue with his engagement with Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile and Horace’s Epodes, I argue that the Argonautica rereads Aeneas’ exemplary model as a guide to internecine conflict. Where the Aeneid draws a clear, if morally complex, line from Aeneas’ arma to Augustus’ imperium, the Argonautica offers a more complicated mandate for the Flavians, the new imperial family under whom Valerius composed his (re)foundational poem.
While the Aeneid, too, takes as its starting point the conflict between Jupiter’s and Juno’s desired sequence of events, it stages over the course of its twelve books the triumph of Jupiter’s fatum, a mandate for Aeneas’ descendants to rule the world over and against Juno’s favoured Greeks and Carthaginians.Footnote 12 Compromise is key: Jupiter resorts to the same sort of infernal powers as Juno through his employment of the Dirae in Aeneid 12, while Juno allows the Roman state to emerge.Footnote 13 In Argonautica 4, we see a similar merging of their two agendas, with Juno’s furor-driven methods becoming the vehicle of Jupiter’s translatio imperii. Indeed, Jupiter’s assertion of his firma potestas and his parting injunction i … moue confirm that what transpires — whatever Juno and her Furiae will carry out — falls under the umbrella of his plans.Footnote 14 This history, then, is driven by forces that extend the ethical complexity of Valerius’ and Vespasian’s Augustan narrative.
What exactly was this narrative? For Vergil, pietas and fides formed the foundation on which Rome’s historical edifice was built. While the semantic range of these terms is famously wide, for the purposes of this argument fides constitutes good faith in the present: between individuals, families, nations, and so on.Footnote 15 Pietas, on the other hand, connotes loyalty or piety in the diachronic sense: to ancestral exempla, to the Roman collective, to past precedent. The virtues of fidelity and piety foreground the tension between individual and collective interests. One need look no further than Aeneas’ denial of his personal desires in the interests of his puer and pater,Footnote 16 and the galvanising effect of seeing his as-yet-unborn Roman descendants in the Underworld: incenditque animum famae uenientis amore (Aen. 6.889: ‘[Anchises] enflamed his mind with passion for the glory to come’). It is Aeneas’ pietas — in conflict with his fides to Dido — that catalyses Rome’s immota fata. Just as divine conflict finds resolution through the redirection of the gods’ interests towards the same historical outcome, so too does Aeneas’ pietas to state and family commit him to the imperial trajectory.
Vergil’s celebration of fidelity thus reflects a key component in the rhetoric of the emperor whom he honours.Footnote 17 Indeed, it is one of the future Romans, Augustus’ nephew and son-in-law Marcellus, who illustrates the interdependence of personal qualities and imperial might at the centre of Roman thought (Aen. 6.870–9):
nimium uobis Romana propago
uisa potens, superi, propria haec si dona fuissent …
heu pietas, heu prisca fides inuictaque bello
dextera!
The Roman race would have seemed too powerful to you, o gods, if these gifts too had been theirs … alas pietas, alas ancient fides, and right hand unconquered in war!
Marcellus’ pietas and fides embody the promise of a stable succession so vital to Augustus’ intertwining of biological and political continuity. As much scholarship has shown, familial harmony was a cornerstone of imperial ideology, beginning with Augustus’ role as pater patriae — a title that deliberately blurred the lines between familial and state pietas.Footnote 18
As the Flavian dynasty came to power, imperial emphasis on pietas became only more important, as Vespasian and his heirs sought to define themselves in counterpoint to the Julio-Claudians’ internecine violence.Footnote 19 This rhetoric, however, brought with it the same questions that had dogged Augustus and his heirs: if family and state coalesce, what might happen if competing loyalties fractured the imperial centre?
These anxieties manifest in the literary tradition, where the elite households of epic and tragedy become a site of anxiety about what constitutes true fides and pietas.Footnote 20 The issue of loyalty to the Roman collective becomes particularly fraught for Lucan, whose Bellum Ciuile shows the interests of individual and collective diverging under the pressure of civil war and the fracturing of personal fides, good faith, on the part of his historical actors.Footnote 21 Indeed, as Augoustakis et al. point out, Lucan reflects the semantic fragmentation that emerged towards the end of the Republic, as political allegiance shifted from state to individual: ‘in this ever-receding hall of mirrors, Lucan articulates the challenges of understanding fides when the state itself has broken down’.Footnote 22
In turn, Valerius shows how this collective enterprise has a deceptive rhetoric at its core.Footnote 23 Setting literary and historical practices of emulation side by side as a response to Vergil’s fusion of familial, national and poetic narratives, Valerius interrogates whether the Augustan historical ideal is, in the Flavian moment, so clearly defined: the state is not as clear-cut an entity as before, and the historical outlook of Valerius’ literary tradition is far from straightforward.Footnote 24
Valerius expands the possibility latent in the Aeneid that Aeneas’ triumph is a type of civic violence, with the proto-Roman Trojans fighting against the Latin peoples who will shortly become their compatriots.Footnote 25 Over and again, Vergil’s Aeneid presents Rome’s mythic prehistory as a series of events that could be construed as civil war — the war between Trojans and Latins, the images of Romulus and Remus, of Julius Caesar and Pompey, of Actium — depending on how actors and audience ‘read’ the protagonists in terms of their national identities and characteristics — what Reed has called a ‘schema [of identities] that shifts with the narratology of the poem’Footnote 26 — but contains them within a concrete trajectory that had resulted in the stability, wealth and glory of Augustan Rome. Valerius offers no such peaceful horizon for his Vergilian adventure. Just as the Aeneid ‘avoids the positive sense of a national identity’Footnote 27 that would allow the reader to distinguish ethnically and ethically between Trojans and Latins, so too does Valerius provoke his audience to see the inconsistencies of past models playing out in the present.
A brief note on methodology before diving in. In his study on the logic of civil violence, Kalyvas identifies the semantic contest over definitions of conflict as itself part of internal division.Footnote 28 This is consistent with ancient theory. As Price discusses apropos of stasis in Thucydides, in times of civil strife language undergoes a sort of context-specific translation, in which original meanings are retained but their value changes as opposition and affinities are redefined.Footnote 29 The ability to assign morally (or, in Valerius’ case, generically and ideologically) loaded terms to an event or events — essentially, the ability to ascribe a particular teleology to a set of actions — represents a means to claim legitimacy for the desired project. In the context of the Flavian accession, I argue, Valerius’ interest in the weaponisation of recycled language reflects fundamental concerns about the future promised by Rome’s traditional rhetorics.
I start by showing Hercules’ role as the agent of Vergilian epic in the Argonautica. I then demonstrate how, in the debate over whether to continue without him, both sides justify their arguments through competing conceptions of pietas and fides, while at the same time aligning with the forces that oppose Aeneas’ voyage throughout the Aeneid. By representing a contest over epic values, the Argonautic debate reenacts the Aeneid’s defining conflict between Jovian narrative and Junonian counter-narrative with which we began. Finally, I suggest that the use of Augustan language against itself — the division of word and meaning, together with the Lucanian echoes that permeate the episode — shows how the rhetoric of loyalty may work against the Argonauts’ collective enterprise.
II Hercules and Vergilian epic
We begin with Hercules. Valerius is, of course, far from the first poet to introduce this greatest of heroes as a figure of heroic and poetic imitatio, and the model he inherits is far from straightforward. Within the Argonautic tradition, Apollonius’ Heracles had already played his part as example for Jason and the crew, and as a litmus test for the heroic modus operandi that would win the day, embodying both biē and mētis in his dual roles of civiliser and destroyer.Footnote 30 As he progresses on the path to apotheosis, Heracles’ increasing isolation from his companions underscores the disparity between human and divine achievement, juxtaposing his heroic exemplum with its impossibility of attainment.Footnote 31
So, too, Vergil’s iteration of Hercules. In the Aeneid, the protagonists hear of but do not see Hercules, experiencing his furor as an object of veneration through Evander’s distancing narrative. Even as Aeneas’ journey sets him on a parallel track to Hercules’ reported career, this combination of destructive violence and approaching godhead raises the question of which facets of Hercules’ story he will emulate.Footnote 32
This profound ambivalence informs the Hercules whom we meet in Valerius’ Argonautica. In Books 1 and 2, he acts as a guide for the Argonauts as they set out to win their heroic laurels, a sort of generic conscience who models epic practice.Footnote 33 In Book 2, for instance, when the Argonauts find themselves stranded on Lemnos by adverse winds and are then ensnared by the charms of the Lemnian women, it is Hercules who recalls them to their mission (V.F. 2.373–84):
… donec resides Tirynthius heros
non tulit, ipse rati inuigilans atque integer urbis:
inuidisse deos tantum maris aequor adortis
desertasque domos fraudataque tempore segni
uota patrum; quid et ipse uiris cunctantibus adsit?
‘o miseri quicumque tuis accessimus actis!
Phasin et Aeeten Scythicique pericula ponti
redde,’ ait, ‘Aesonide! me tecum solus in aequor
rerum traxit amor, dum spes mihi sistere montes
Cyaneos uigilemque alium spoliare draconem.
si sedet Aegaei scopulos habitare profundi,
hoc mecum Telamon peraget meus.’
Until the hero of Tiryns could no longer bear their inaction, while he himself watches over the ship and is untouched by the city: the gods begrudge their venture out on so great an expanse of the sea, they have deserted their homes and betrayed their parents’ prayers with this idleness; and why should he himself wait for those who hesitate? ‘O wretched are we who joined your quest! Return Phasis and Aeetes and the dangers of the Scythian sea to me, Jason!’ he says, ‘Love of deeds alone drew me onto the sea with you, while I hoped to bring the Cyanean rocks to a halt and slay another wakeful dragon. If you are resolved to settle among the Aegean cliffs, my Telamon will persevere with me.’
While Hercules presents their quest in terms of the path to glory, his exhortation takes on a wider moral significance through its evocation of his role as Stoic hero: his self-control enables the crew to move forward.Footnote 34 Likewise, Hercules’ description as integer suggests generic as well as ethical purity,Footnote 35 contrasting his amor rerum with the Argonauts’ romantic amor.
Hercules’ fidelity to the tenets of epic takes a distinctly Vergilian tone. His admonition that the Argonauts cheat the prayers of their fathers echoes Aeneas’ rejection of Dido on the basis of the promises he owes to Anchises and Ascanius: me puer Ascanius capitisque iniuria cari,/quem regno Hesperiae fraudo et fatalibus aruis (Aen. 4.354–5: ‘the boy Ascanius and the wrong done his dear head, the boy whom I cheat of his Hesperian kingdom and destined lands’). Hercules, it seems, is guided by the same familial imperatives that propel Aeneas from the shores of Carthage to the Roman future.
And the epic Hercules re-starts looks remarkably like the Aeneid. Reawakened to his mission, Jason gathers up the weapons, crew and oars scattered on the shore (V.F. 2.390–3):
tunc Argum Tiphynque uocat pelagoque parari
praecipitat: petit ingenti clamore magister
arma uiros pariter sparsosque in litore remos.
Then he calls to Argus and Tiphys and urges them to make ready for the sea. With a great shout the helmsman seeks at once the equipment, men and oars strewn about the beach.
Echoing Vergil’s programmatic opening line, Hercules’ rhetoric gets the Romanised Argo under way once more.Footnote 36 The scene recalls two further Vergilian instances. First, the aftermath of Juno’s storm in Aeneid 1, the raw material from which Vergil creates Augustan order: apparent rari nantes in gurgite uasto,/arma uirum tabulaeque et Troia gaza per undas (Aen. 1.118–19: ‘here and there swimmers appear in the vast whirlpool, men’s weapons, planks, and the wealth of Troy amidst the waves’).Footnote 37 Jason’s equipment, strewn across the beach, recalls Aeneas’ Trojans scattered through the waves by Juno’s squall, and his oars the tabulae or planks of Aeneas’ shattered ships.Footnote 38 This storm, we remember, is itself quelled by a figurative call to pietas, in the shape of the famous statesman simile with which Vergil describes Neptune’s intervention as like ‘a man distinguished for his piety and service’ (Aen. 1.148–53: pietate grauem ac meritis … uirum).
Valerius’ next Vergilian reference has a similar effect, looking to the end of Aeneas’ sojourn with Dido in Aeneid 4. After Mercury has relayed Jupiter’s message to Aeneas, telling him to leave Carthage forthwith, Aeneas hastens to marshal his crew (Aen. 4.288–90):Footnote 39
Mnesthea Sergestumque uocat fortemque Serestum,
classem aptent taciti sociosque ad litora cogant,
arma parent …
He calls Mnestheus and Sergestus and brave Serestus, that they might ready the fleet in silence and gather their companions to the shore, prepare the equipment …
Through this triple echo, Valerius distinguishes in a clear-cut and distinctly Vergilian manner two types of amor and the generic teleologies to which they lead. Hercules’ assertion of Vergilian fidelity — to the mission, to the collective interest embodied by the Argonauts’ families — suggests that pietas still undergirds the Roman imperial project. Just as Vergil had built Hercules’ heroic paradigm into the Aeneid as a model for Aeneas’ — and Augustus’ — mandate to extend Roman imperium, so too does Valerius conflate fidelity to Hercules with fidelity to Augustan tradition.
III Valerius’ civic storm
Like Vergil’s storm, Hercules’ sudden disappearance from the Argonautica is Juno’s work, engendering a moment of crisis as to how this quest will continue.Footnote 40 Orchestrating the rape of Hercules’ beloved Hylas by a nymph in Book 3, she causes Hercules to run off in a maddened rage, turning his pios amores — the object of Jupiter’s sympathy at line 4.2, above — against him. As he disappears from sight, Hercules leaves his companions to wonder whether they ought to continue without him or wait for his return. Jason is particularly perplexed: stat lacrimans magnoque uiri cunctatur amore (V.F. 3.606: ‘the captain stands weeping and is delayed by his great love for the man’). Like Hercules’, Jason’s pius amor becomes a source of delay. And through the verb cunctatur, this fidelity intertwines with his literary orientation to Vergilian epic. A brief look at this verb reveals its centrality to moments of narrative divergence — potential or realised — in the Aeneid, among them Aeneas’ hesitation at leaving Dido (4.390); his flash of indecision before killing Turnus (12.940); and Vulcan’s pause before making love to Venus and undertaking the construction of Aeneas’ arms (8.388).Footnote 41 In each, the character’s indecision marks a place and a choice at which their story, and Rome’s, could take an unintended turn away from Jupiter’s prescribed historical narrative.
This last instance is especially telling. By giving in to his wife’s charms, Vulcan accedes to her request to forge new weapons for Aeneas, a project that he outlines to his Cyclops-assistants thus: ‘huc aduertite mentem/arma acri facienda uiro’ (Aen. 8.440–3: ‘Turn your minds to this, to making arms for a fierce man’). Here again we find arms for the man, in the moment when the gods equip Aeneas to overcome his final sources of delay. Here is the beginning of the achievement of Aeneas’, and Vergil’s, foundational project, the triumph of national pietas over erotic jealousy. Venus’ lack of marital fides is subsumed by her contribution to the greater (Roman) good.
Likewise in Argonautica 3. In contrast to Hercules’ motivating amor rerum on Lemnos, this amor — both Hercules’ for Hylas, and Jason’s for Hercules — sets fides to the man in tension with pietas to the mission.Footnote 42 While Jason hesitates, however, his companions are for the most part impatient to set out (V.F. 3.628–32):
at studiis iamdudum freta iuuentus
orat inire uias: unum tanto afore coetu
nec minus in sese generis dextrasque potentes
esse ferunt. tali mentem pars maxima flatu
erigit et uana gliscunt praecordia lingua.
But the crew, daring in their venture, long since beg to set sail: they say that only one will be lacking in so great a troop, that they are no less noble in lineage nor strong in hand. With such pride the majority raises its spirit and their hearts swell with empty boasting.
The phrase uana lingua suggests that the Argonauts’ confidence is fundamentally misplaced, and that their abilities may not live up to their Herculean amor rerum.Footnote 43 Valerius thus flags the problem of language as we watch Jason and his companions debate their next move: by what mechanism will this iteration of Vergilian epic be achieved?Footnote 44
In what follows, Valerius’ protagonists intertwine Hercules’ normative epic rhetoric with antithetical narrative outcomes, staging a competition between Lucanian and Vergilian uses of pietas to achieve a desired telos. Through their debate, Valerius poses the same question for his own literary pietas. Valerius follows Vergil’s interrogation of the furor with which Rome’s foundation was achieved by examining the consequences of embedding Hercules’ exemplum into Roman history. Although Hercules himself acts in the collective interest on Lemnos, his companions’ response to his loss illustrates how his epicising rhetoric may be perverted. With Hercules’ disappearance, the metaphor of civic unrest that figures Vergil’s storm becomes actual conflict among the Argonauts over where their duty lies — and unlike in Aeneid 1, there is no clear resolution. As both sides claim to represent Augustan fidelity, the lurking presence of the Bellum Ciuile, with its sustained analogy between storm and civil war, reveals the instability of pietas as a means to construct order out of chaos in this new imperial world.Footnote 45
IV Pietas to the past: Telamon
Two among the crew, Telamon and Meleager, take opposing stances. Both profess loyalty to Hercules and, through him, to the Vergilian epic he represents. At this fork in the narrative road, each attempts to lead his companions in a different direction by claiming to be the new voice of Hercules’ ethos. Through this bifurcation of the Argonautic quest, Valerius demonstrates how Vergilian ideals may be fragmented to various ends. As Kalyvas suggests, in the context of civil conflict such public competition before an evaluating audience offers not only a platform but also, to the winner, a reward for interpersonal contention.Footnote 46 In turn, the rivalry between leaders creates false binaries through the weaponisation of legitimating language.Footnote 47 Telamon and Meleager thus enact civil war’s innate tendency to ‘other’ the opposition, justified through the presentation of Hercules as the object of pietas and fides both personal and emulative.Footnote 48
Telamon, the only one to argue for waiting, is first to speak. As we saw above, he is the sole Argonaut whom Hercules singles out as sharing his heroic ambitions (2.384: hoc mecum Telamon peraget meus). He recognises the crew’s limitations sans Hercules and pleads loyalty in the collective interest (V.F. 3.637–45):
at pius ingenti Telamon iam fluctuat ira
cum fremitu saeuisque furens periuria dictis
insequitur magnoque inplorat numina questu.
idem orans prensatque uiros demissaque supplex
haeret ad ora ducis, nil se super Hercule fari
sed socio quocumque, gemens; quamquam aspera fama
iam loca iamque feras per barbara litora gentes,
non alium contra Alciden, non pectora tanta
posse dari.
But faithful Telamon now seethes with fierce rage, and wildly censures their cruel strife with savage words and calls upon the gods with loud complaint. Again beseeching he lays hold of each man and clings as suppliant to the captain’s downcast gaze; he speaks not on Hercules’ behalf, but for any comrade; although no other but Hercules, no hearts so brave can now be found against such wild lands, and the savage nations of the barbarian shores.
Like Hercules’, Telamon’s loyalty evokes Vergilian precedents. The line at pius Telamon … fluctuat ira echoes Aeneas’ internal struggle over leaving Dido in Aeneid 4 — his own conflict of personal and national ties (Aen. 4.393–6):Footnote 49
at pius Aeneas, quamquam lenire dolentem
solando cupit et dictis auertere curas,
multa gemens magnoque animum labefactus amore
iussa tamen diuum exsequitur classemque reuisit.
But faithful Aeneas, although he desires to soften her grieving by comforting her and to take away her concerns with words, groaning much and shaken in his heart by his great love, nevertheless follows the commands of the gods and returns to the fleet.
As MacLennan has pointed out, Vergil’s use of the phrase pius Aeneas — the first since Book 1 — is ‘consciously shocking’ in the context of his abandonment of Dido.Footnote 50 And indeed, Telamon’s version of fidelity is complicated by another Vergilian echo, of Dido’s reaction to Aeneas’ desertion: ingeminant curae rursusque resurgens/saeuit amor magnoque irarum fluctuat aestu (Aen. 4.531–2: ‘her cares redouble and love rages, surging once more, and she seethes on a great swell of anger’).Footnote 51
Within the scope of the Aeneid, Dido’s potent combination of rage and grief anticipates the impact of Aeneas’ accruing losses: his ruthless murder of Turnus, fuelled by an accumulation of grief at what he has had to give up along the way (Aen. 12.945–8):
ille, oculis postquam saeui monimenta doloris
exuuiasque hausit, furiis accensus et ira
terribilis: ‘tune hinc spoliis indute meorum
eripiare mihi?’
He, after he has drunk in the monuments and trophies of cruel grief with his eyes, kindled with fury and awful in his rage: ‘Will you be rescued from me, you who wear the spoils of my people?’
Faced with what he has lost — the friends, loves, homeland, that he has sacrificed to his greater mission — Aeneas, like Dido, succumbs to grief-driven rage in the final moments of the epic. Both victim and victor use violence to work out the conflict between fides and pietas.
In literary terms, Hercules and Telamon enact in miniature how Aeneas’ legacy lives on in his heirs, a tradition that encompasses not just Aeneas’ fidelity to his divine mission, but also the rage — Aeneas’ and Dido’s — engendered by what is lost along the way. When faced with Hylas’ disappearance, Hercules too devolves into madness: sic furiis accensa gerens Tirynthius ora/fertur (V.F. 3.590–1: ‘the Tirynthian, his face aflame with rage rushes forth’).Footnote 52 Like Aeneas before him, Hercules is ‘aflame with rage’, with the furor earlier transmitted from Dido to Aeneas. While on Lemnos Hercules had played the part of Mercury; here he and his representative Telamon inherit the traces of their literary predecessors’ signature weakness. The parallel suggests that Hercules must, in fact, be left behind in order for the epic to progress, and that Telamon’s fides is therefore misguided — he is faithful to the wrong storyline.
This multilayered echo raises several questions about the consequences of fidelity to the past and future as well as fides between the characters themselves. Aeneas’ ultimate violence aligns him with those who populate his past. The question, then, is where each actor’s imitatio lands them, and how the echoes of past exemplars project onto the future of the one doing the imitating: each model contains a myriad of possibilities that are elided in the subjective, rhetorical process of their retelling.Footnote 53
In this case, what is at issue is whether Telamon’s loyalty represents amor rerum — fidelity to Hercules’ ethos — or the type of amor displayed on Lemnos. Like Jason’s, Telamon’s fides to Hercules delays the Argo’s onward journey. Telamon enacts fidelity in the negative sense, a regressive impulse that competes with Jupiter’s plans for progress.
Furthermore, his saeua dicta evoke Valerius’ description of the winds that threatened the Argo in Book 1 (V.F. 1.592–6):
… regemque dedit, quem iussa uereri
saeua cohors: uix monte chalybs iterataque muris
saxa domant Euros. cum iam cohibere frementum
ora nequit, rex tunc aditus et claustra refringit
ipse uolens placatque data fera murmura porta.
… and [the all-powerful] appointed a king whom the wild company was bidden to fear: iron and walls doubled with stone can scarce keep the winds prisoner in the mountains. As soon as he can no longer restrain their roaring voices, then the king willingly bursts open the barriers and soothes their wild murmurs with an open gate.
Not only does this characterisation anticipate Telamon’s emotional state (3.637, above: ingenti fluctuat ira), but it is also strongly indebted to Vergil’s scene of divine dissent in Aeneid 10, in which Juno and Venus argue over the Trojans’ fate (Aen. 10.94–9):Footnote 54
‘tum decuit metuisse tuis: nunc sera querelis
haud iustis adsurgis et inrita iurgia iactas.’
Talibus orabat Iuno, cunctique fremebant
caelicolae adsensu uario, ceu flamina prima
cum deprensa fremunt siluis et caeca uolutant
murmura uenturos nautis prodentia uentos.
‘Then was it fitting to fear for your own: now too late you swell with unjust complaints and toss about your fruitless threats.’ With such words Juno spoke, and all the gods murmured with various opinion, just as when the first gusts, confined by the forests, grumble and roll forth their hidden rumbling, betraying the coming winds to sailors.
Vergil’s description of the gods looks back to the fuming winds of Aeneid 1 (Aen. 1.55–6: illi indignantes magno cum murmure montis/circum claustra fremunt; ‘they, fretting, with a great rumbling of the mountain roar about the gates’). Through this multilayered set of allusions, then, Valerius exposes Telamon’s version of amor as fundamentally opposed to Jupiter’s forward-looking plans. Despite his Aeneas-like pietas and the ideology he shares with Hercules, Telamon aligns with Vergilian forces of discord. This civic storm, and the pietas that prompts it, is an obstacle to the Argonauts’ mission. So too does Valerius’ implicit alignment of Telamon with Dido present this type of loyalty as leading to the divergence of fidelity to past and fidelity to present. In Dido’s case, amor for Aeneas contends not only with her loyalty to her former husband Sychaeus but also to the future of her nation and city, a conflict that ultimately undoes her imperial project.Footnote 55 Telamon’s devotion to Hercules suggests a discontinuity with the Augustan past in which fidelity to family intertwined with forward progress. In this new present, loyalty to an individual is fundamentally at odds with the communal interest, and, ultimately, with Jupiter’s historical programme.
V Amor rerum (novarum): Meleager
Telamon’s chief opponent, Meleager, likewise combines Hercules’ Vergilian attributes with the forces of disruption. From the very beginning of the expedition he appears as Hercules’ rival, a challenger to his status as premier hero (V.F. 1.433–5):Footnote 56
at tibi collectas soluit iam fibula uestes
ostenditque umeros fortes spatiumque superbi
pectoris Herculeis aequum, Meleagre, lacertis.
But for you, Meleager, the clasp already loosens the gathered cloak and shows your strong shoulders and the breadth of your proud chest, equal to Hercules’ arms.
And as he enters the debate in Book 3 Meleager, like Hercules, is introduced in terms distinctly reminiscent of Aeneas (V.F. 3.645–9):
rursum instimulat ducitque fauentes
magnanimus Calydone satus, potioribus ille
deteriora fouens semperque inuersa tueri
durus et haud ullis umquam superabilis aequis
rectorumue memor.
On the other side the great-hearted son of Calydon goads and provokes those in favour, he who encouraged worse plans with stronger words and, always steadfast in pursuit of the wrong end, was ever unyielding to any justice and unmindful of his leaders.
In this description, however, we start to see how Meleager’s magnanimitas is in no way governed by Aeneas’ characteristic respect, his pietas. Far from the achievement of his assigned duty, Meleager’s ambition implicates him in a narrative of moral decline (deteriora fouens), charted through a network of intertextual echoes. We turn first to Meleager’s complicated history of familial piety, and then to the ‘great-heartedness’ that disrupts it.
This narrative, centring on the same ethical lynchpin of competing loyalties, is readily available in Meleager’s own mythology.Footnote 57 A brief survey will set the stage for this line of inquiry. Meleager’s first (extant) appearance in the mythological tradition is during the embassy to Achilles in Iliad 9, when the Greek leaders make a futile attempt to persuade Achilles to rejoin battle.Footnote 58 In this effort, Achilles’ tutor Phoinix uses Meleager as an exemplum of the destructive effects of heroic competition (Il. 9.527–605): by prioritising personal glory over collective interest, both Achilles and Meleager prove fatal to their companions — a point to which we will return below. In the Roman tradition, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Meleager appears in distinctly Argonautic fashion as the leader of a band of youthful heroes motivated by the quest for glory: Meleagros et una/lecta manus iuuenum coiere cupidine laudis (Met. 8.299–300: ‘Meleager and a picked troop of youths gather out of desire for glory’). This description echoes Catullus’ introduction of the Argonauts themselves (Cat. 64.4: lecti iuuenes, Argiuae robora pubis; ‘picked young men, the might of Argive youth’), thereby establishing Meleager’s place in a (Argonautic) cycle of moral decline.
The tale that follows is, as in Homer, of the quest for fame’s destructive effects. As the group musters to pursue the boar, Meleager falls in love with the huntress Atalanta. After she is the first to strike their quarry (8.380–3) and he himself has dealt the fatal blow (8.414–19), Meleager gifts her the spoils — a gesture that their companions deeply resent (8.425–31: inuidere laeti). When Meleager’s maternal uncles take the spoils from Atalanta, Meleager kills them, thus prompting his mother Althaea to exact her own revenge by burning the log to which Meleager’s lifespan is tied (8.432–514). Here, contest for glory leads to intrafamilial violence, rooted, through the echo of Catullus 64, in precisely the type of group endeavour that Meleager is trying to get under way in the Argonautica.Footnote 59
Catullus himself had heralded the Argonautic venture as the last heroic hurrah before humanity’s decline. His Argonauts sail through a world in which pietas still holds true (Cat. 64.386: nondum spreta pietate), reconciling the divine and mortal realms. With the seas’ opening, however, a new age ensues, marked by the rupture of every kind of loyalty (Cat. 64.399–406):
perfudere manus fraterno sanguine fratres,
destitit exstinctos natus lugere parentes,
optauit genitor primaeui funera nati …
omnia fanda nefanda malo permixta furore
iustificam nobis mentem auertere deorum.
Brothers drenched their hands with fraternal blood, the son left off mourning his deceased parents, the father longed for the funeral of his firstborn son … everything lawful and unlawful mixed by evil madness turned from us the justly mind of the gods.
Valerius responds to Catullus’ invitation to read collective heroic action as part of a narrative of moral deterioration, using Meleager’s story to map the redefinition of pietas in this new imperial landscape: Meleager’s re-launch of the Argonauts, driven by his own ambition, puts the rhetoric of tradition in service of personal glory — an inversion of Aeneas’ family-oriented pietas. As we saw above, the linguistic turmoil that Catullus identifies (omnia fanda nefanda … permixta) as characteristic of this age reflects the rhetorical instability inherent in civil war. Meleager participates in this no less than Telamon, redirecting the concepts of fides and pietas to his own agenda.
In assigning the epithet magnanimus to Meleager, Valerius not only inserts him into the Vergilian traditions of Hercules and Aeneas, but also, through Meleager’s own mythology, introduces an element of destructive competition as the linchpin between positive and negative emulation.Footnote 60 While magnanimus is (as Manuwald and others observe) a stock epithet of the epic hero, I suggest that its deployment in a scene centred on the negotiation between literary loyalties cannot but be loaded.Footnote 61
A brief glance at the distribution of magnanimus in the Aeneid suggests the epithet’s significance for Vergil’s successors. It first appears in Jupiter’s programmatic speech, in which he outlines for all to hear the future of Rome’s (Augustan) history (Aen. 1.258–60):
‘cernes urbem et promissa Lauini
moenia, sublimemque feres ad sidera caeli
magnanimum Aenean; neque me sententia uertit.’
‘You will see the city and promised walls of Lavinium, and will bear aloft to the stars of the sky the great-souled Aeneas; no opinion sways me.’
With these words, Jupiter designates Aeneas as the agent of his foundational narrative — the very one that Juno has just challenged with her storm. Aeneas’ heroic quality, furthermore, is based in his familial pietas, a point reinforced by Vergil’s use of magnanimus to describe the ghosts of heroes (6.307) and of Aeneas’ unborn Roman descendants (6.649) in the Underworld. Indeed, magnanimus is used almost exclusively for Aeneas and his family: Jupiter is the only other character to be described thus more than once.Footnote 62 Strikingly, Jupiter is twice called magnanimus in Aeneid 12, once by Juno (12.144) and once by Juturna (12.878), as they wrestle with the inevitability of Jupiter’s wishes against their own. This epithet thus establishes a specific type of pietas: to the epic tradition and to Aeneas’ (and Augustus’) Trojan inheritance as the mechanism of Jupiter’s historical plans. Violent or otherwise, magnanimitas is the vehicle of the future.
In adopting this concept, Valerius develops its complexity as the means of achieving Jupiter’s agenda, but in such a way as to separate ethics from inevitability. Even as he provides the model for progress, it is Hercules who represents the instability of epic magnanimitas in the Argonautica. Valerius assigns him this epithet during a storm at sea, when his weapons and superhuman strength are rendered useless (V.F. 1.634–5: magnanimus spectat pharetras et inutile robur/Amphitryoniades; ‘the great-hearted son of Amphitryon gazes at his quiver and useless club’).Footnote 63 This scene — in which Hercules glances forlornly at his own epic material, playing on robur as both strength and wood — raises the question of what he can actually achieve in the world of the Argonautica. By deploying the epithet magnanimus precisely in the context of the storm, Valerius links it to flawed rather than constructive heroic imitatio.
Even more problematically, the Argonauts are collectively called magnanimi at what is perhaps the most pessimistic moment of their outward journey. Earlier in Book 3, the Argonauts land at Cyzicus, and are eagerly welcomed by the inhabitants and their eponymous king. Setting off once more, they are blown back in the night to the same shores; when each side mistakes the other for hostile forces, they attack, and the Argonauts end up unintentionally killing their host in a battle that Valerius repeatedly likens to civil war.Footnote 64 He describes the Argonauts in battle thus: talia magnanimi diuerso turbine fundunt/tela uiri (V.F. 3.243–4: ‘such weapons do the great-souled heroes pour forth in an opposing whirl’). Here, as in the sea-storm, Aeneas’ epithet is dramatically undermined by its deployment in the wrong venue. The Argonauts’ ambition has the potential to prove self-destructive.
Meleager’s initial epithet, then, links him to Hercules in both positive and negative senses. This likeness continues as Meleager presents his argument for pressing on without further delay (V.F. 3.652–60):
‘septimus hic celsis descendit montibus auster
iamque ratem Scythicis forsan statuisset in oris.
nos patriae immemores, maneant ceu nulla reuectos
gaudia, sed duro saeuae sub rege Mycenae,
ad medium cunctamur iter. si finibus ullis
has tolerare moras et inania tempora possem,
regna hodie et dulcem sceptris Calydona tenerem
laetus opum pacisque meae tutusque manerem
quis genitor materque locis.’
‘Now for the seventh day the south wind sweeps down from the lofty mountains and already would it perhaps have beached the ship on Scythian shores, but we, forgetful of our homeland, as if no joys awaited us on arrival, but forbidding Mycenae and its cruel king, are halted mid-path. If in any territory I were able to bear these delays and this useless time, today I would rule my kingdom and sweet Calydon, happy in wealth and peace, and I would remain safe together with my father and mother.’
Meleager chastises the Argonauts’ inania tempora as Hercules had their segni tempore in Lemnos.Footnote 65 He, too, echoes Aeneid 4 by defining the Argonauts’ mission in terms of the duty owed to their forebears and adapts Aeneas’ contrafactual wish that Troy were still standing (Aen. 4.340–3):Footnote 66
‘me si fata meis paterentur ducere uitam
auspiciis et sponte mea componere curas,
urbem Troianam primum dulcisque meorum
reliquias colerem, Priami tecta alta manerent …’
‘If my fates would allow me to spend my life under my own auspices and to arrange my affairs according to my own wishes, I would rather cultivate the Trojan city and the sweet relics of my own people, the high roofs of Priam would still stand …’
Curiously, however, Meleager like Telamon echoes not just Aeneas, but Dido, revealing a sinister underside to his efforts to get the Argonautic epic back on track. His phrase inania tempora evokes the message to Aeneas with which Dido commissions her sister Anna, begging him to delay his departure until he can find fair winds and she has had time to process her loss (Aen. 4.429–34):
‘quo ruit? extremum hoc miserae det munus amanti:
exspectet facilemque fugam uentosque ferentis.
non iam coniugium antiquum, quod prodidit, oro,
nec pulchro ut Latio careat regnumque relinquat:
tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque furori,
dum mea me uictam doceat fortuna dolere.’
‘Where is he rushing off to? Let him give this last gift to his miserable lover: let him wait for an easy voyage and carrying winds. I do not now ask for that former marriage, which he has betrayed, nor that he should forfeit lovely Latium and abandon his kingdom: I seek an empty time, peace and space for my rage, while my fortune teaches me to mourn in my defeat.’
This echo reinforces the sense that Telamon’s desire to wait is not only misguided but downright dangerous: while Dido’s request for tempus inane may be as straightforward as she presents it, her subsequent wish to punish Aeneas by murdering his son (4.600–2) suggests that what she really wants is the opportunity for revenge.Footnote 67 Like Telamon, she invokes the ties of love (amanti) against the pull of destiny, positing personal loyalty as a regressive force.
As we have seen, though, Meleager’s profession of familial pietas is irrevocably complicated by his mythological history. Through Althaea, indeed, Meleager’s myth enacts the self-destructive qualities of divided pietas: for Meleager and his mother, natal, filial and amatory loyalties set in motion an implosive violence that — in the Argonautic context — adumbrates Jason and Medea’s own future.Footnote 68 In echoing Hercules’ rhetoric, Meleager advances towards a destructive version of heroic imitatio, one that will reach beyond Valerius’ poem into the Argonautica’s tragic aftermath.
But that is not all. Valerius interweaves Meleager’s final exhortation with a dense network of intra- and intertextual allusion, suggesting a slew of new narrative pathways down which the rhetoric of fidelity may lead. He begins with a call to seize the moment (V.F. 3.680–2):
‘uos, quibus et uirtus et spes in limine primo,
tendite, dum rerum patiens calor et rude membris
robur inest …’
‘You, who have both courage and spirit on the first threshold of life, hasten on, while your zeal may bear struggles and fresh strength is in your limbs …’
He claims robur equal to the sons of the gods and takes over Hercules’ role as the guardian of arma uirumque. Meleager’s phrase, indeed, claims not just this iteration of the Argonauts’ journey, but its whole literary tradition through the echo of Catullus 64 (Cat. 64.4: Argiuae robora pubis) — a passage to which, as we have seen, Meleager’s Ovidian tradition is closely tied, and which anticipates the rupture between ages.
More problematically, his words echo Jupiter’s address to his sons at the launch of the Argo’s voyage in Argonautica 1 (V.F. 1.561–3):
tunc oculos Aegaea refert ad caerula, robur
Herculeum Ledaeque tuens genus, atque ita fatur:
‘tendite in astra, uiri …’
Then he turns his eyes to the blue Aegean, gazing at the mighty Hercules and Leda’s children, and speaks thus: ‘Hasten on to the stars, men …’
Jupiter’s exhortation singles out his sons — Hercules, Castor, and Pollux — suggesting that Meleager’s words are the uana lingua earlier indicated by Valerius: Meleager is no semi-divine Hercules, and in competing with him, is punching somewhat above his weight.Footnote 69
Furthermore, while robur is as here frequently used of Hercules’ outstanding strength,Footnote 70 its Vergilian history has a distinct instability, referring to the Trojan horse, Turnus’ spear, Pallas’ failed strength and — Valerius’ most immediate model — Drances’ mocking words to Turnus, urging him to face Aeneas man-to-man (Aen. 11.368–70):
‘aut si fama mouet, si tantum pectore robur
concipis et si adeo dotalis regia cordi est,
aude atque aduersum fidens fer pectus in hostem.’
‘Or if glory so moves you, if you foster such vigour in your heart and if your royal marriage is yet so dear to you, be brave, and boldly bear your breast against the enemy.’
By adopting Drances’ exhortation with a view specifically to stepping into Hercules’ shoes, Meleager incites the Argonauts to take on a greater task than they can handle. Not only does he himself seek to compete with the sons of the gods, but he deploys the same rhetoric with which Vergil’s Turnus had been induced to take on another semi-divine hero, Aeneas. As with Telamon above, Meleager’s Vergilian attributes have the unsettling effect of aligning with the opposition to Aeneas’ Roman project, once again raising the question of what Vergilian inheritance these Argonauts will actually get.
VI A new Roman future
Compounding this effect are two echoes of Vergil’s contemporary Horace, which reintroduce the sense of generic play. While Meleager and Hercules’ calls-to-arms resound with the rhetoric of martial epic, Meleager inadvertently echoes an invitation to avoid precisely such ambitions. With the words uos, quibus et uirtus he quotes Horace’s exhortation to escape civil-war-ridden Rome: uos, quibus est uirtus, muliebrem tollite luctum,/Etrusca praeter et uolate litora (Epod. 16.39–40: ‘you, who have courage, set aside womanly grief, and sail along the Etruscan shores’).Footnote 71 The destination to which Horace directs his audience, moreover, is the very antithesis of both the Aeneid and the Argonautica (Epod. 16.57–60):
non huc Argoo contendit remige pinus
neque inpudica Colchis intulit pedem,
non huc Sidonii torserunt cornua nautae,
laboriosa nec cohors Vlixei.
The pine keel did not reach here with its Argive oarage, nor did the shameless Colchian bring her step hither, not here did the Phoenician sailors turn their prows, nor Ulysses’ toiling crew.
Horace moves away from epic’s archetypal ships: their endpoint is the mess of civil war in which Rome is currently embroiled.Footnote 72 Meleager, however, reverses Horace’s direction. The implication, we might suppose, is that he returns to the course that Horace had shunned, a journey towards the antithesis of the Golden Age that Horace imagines.
We find the catalyst of such conflict in the second of Meleager’s two Horatian echoes. His appeal to the Argonauts’ rude robur recalls Horace’s invitation to drink at Epod. 13.3–5:Footnote 73 rapiamus, amici,/occasionem de die dumque uirent genua/et decet, obducta soluatur fronte senectus (‘let us seize the opportunity offered by the day, my friends, and while there is strength in our knees and it is fitting, let old age relax his frowning face’). The occasion for Horace’s carpe diem theme is a storm, which he links in Archilochean fashion to the political turmoil of civil war.Footnote 74 As in his echo of Epod. 16, then, Meleager reverses the direction of Horace’s sympotic invitation, once more activating the trope of storm-as-civil-war even as Meleager summons his crewmates to resume their voyage.
Even more disturbing is the exemplum that Horace adduces to prove his point. He quotes the centaur Chiron’s instructions to his young pupil Achilles to seize leisure and pleasure while he can, before the fatal voyage to Troy (Epod. 13.11–18). Not only does this echo ring ominously around the Argonauts’ re-embarkation, but Meleager’s alignment with Achilles also gives added significance to the sense of rivalry that Valerius builds between Meleager and Hercules through a ‘window-allusion’ to Homer. As Phillips and Lowrie have pointed out, Epod. 13 engages with the embassy to Achilles in Iliad 9, discussed above.Footnote 75 Valerius’ intertextual engagement with Horace’s response to Homer, then, locates not only Meleager’s rhetoric, but also his rivalry with Hercules, in a literary line of continuity from Phoinix’s (negative) exemplum to Achilles, to Roman civil war. The very ‘great-heartedness’ that Valerius attributes to Meleager — his eagerness to compete with Hercules — suggests that he too participates in a potentially fatal contest for glory.
What, then, are we meant to make of this seeming misidentification or mis-assignment of Vergilian labels to Valerius’ not very Aeneas-like characters? Meleager and Hercules share one more epithet, superbus, from which we can pinpoint where Herculean emulation begins to cross the line to destructive competition. Hercules is twice described thus, when he first joins the crew (though this, admittedly, is through Juno’s hostile eyes) and after his rescue of Hesione in Book 2 (V.F. 1.117–19 and 2.543–6):
‘Herculeis nec me umquam fidere fas sit
auxiliis comiti et tantum debere superbo.’
‘May it never be right for me to trust in his help or to owe so much to a proud companion.’
nec minus in scopulos crudique cacumina saxi
emicat Alcides uinclisque tenentibus aufert
uirgineas de rupe manus aptatque superbis
arma umeris. regem inde petens superabat ouanti
litora tuta gradu.
No less does Alcides leap up onto the crags and the peaks of the rough-hewn rock and free the maiden’s hands from the chains binding her to the cliff, and fastens his arms on his proud shoulders. Then in search of the king he traverses the now-safe shores with exultant step.
Given that Juno is the one who precipitated the Argonauts’ current crisis, Hercules’ perceived superbia appears to be one of the underlying causes of this whole mess. And Meleager, too, is introduced as superbus at 1.434, as we saw above. He gains this epithet with a direct comparison between his and Hercules’ musculature, anticipating his claim that he can rival Hercules’ strength. Baraz traces the negative connotations of superbia, and the mistaken self-assessment it represents, to the foundation of the Republic and the overthrow of Tarquinius Superbus.Footnote 76 Meleager’s pride, then, implicates him in the kind of competition for power that leads, not to unity, but to monarchy.Footnote 77 Literary, political, and heroic imitatio — epithet as reenactment — conspire to produce a new narrative of individual ambition masked by the rhetoric of collective interests.
VII Lucan’s distorting lens
Meleager’s Vergilian expression of loyalty re-starts the narrative in a new competitive mode. Valerius marks this shift in terms of his own literary imitatio, as he steps back to show the shadow of the Bellum Ciuile overwriting Vergil’s epic teleology. By assigning Meleager a speech that redirects concepts of Vergilian fidelity towards ends redolent of Lucanian conflict, Valerius shows the potential dissociation between ethos and object engendered by the Argonauts’ Vergilian imitatio.
As he continues his argument, Meleager sounds less and less like Aeneas (V.F. 3.667–78):
‘non datur haec magni proles Iouis, at tibi Pollux
stirpe pares Castorque manent, at cetera diuum
progenies nec parua mihi fiducia gentis.
en egomet quocumque uocas sequar, agmina ferro
plura metam; tibi dicta manus, tibi quicquid in ipso
sanguine erit, iamque hinc operum quae maxima posco …
ille uel insano iamdudum turbidus aestu
uel parta iam laude tumens consortia famae
despicit ac nostris ferri comes abnuit actis.’
‘This child of great Jupiter is not granted to us, but yet, see, Pollux and Castor, equal in birth, remain to you, and other offspring of the gods, and I have no little confidence in my lineage. I for my part will follow wherever you bid, I will cut down more ranks with iron, my hand is promised to you, to you whatever benefit lies in my very blood, and from this point I demand whatever task is the greatest … that one, now either disordered with maddened rage or puffed up with past fame scorns shared glory and refuses to join our enterprise as companion.’
Meleager boasts that the Argonauts’ combined ancestry and strength is a match for Hercules. He furthermore attributes to Hercules his own competitive ethos, implying that Hercules left because he did not want to share glory.Footnote 78 Meleager’s rivalry with Hercules, now explicit, complicates his fidelity to the Argonauts’ collective mission. Effectively, Meleager coopts communal spirit in the interests of his own ambition, adding in a healthy dose of guilt as he implicitly urges his companions to show their nobility in action (stirpe pares … cetera diuum progenies nec parua mihi fiducia gentis). As we know from Meleager’s own story, fidelity to family honour may come at the cost of family itself, potentially pitting his call to arms against the values that theoretically inform his companions’ ethos.
And here we come to the Bellum Ciuile. In his vow of loyalty — egomet quocumque uocas sequar — Meleager adopts the tone and tenor of Caesar’s tribune Laelius in Bellum Ciuile 1. In this scene, after Caesar rallies his troops to march on Rome and, in his words, free it from the would-be tyrant Pompey, his soldiers hesitate, their pietas in conflict with their amor for violence (BCiv. 1.352–6):
dixerat; at dubium non claro murmure uulgus
secum incerta fremit. pietas patriique penates
quamquam caede feras mentes animosque tumentes
frangunt; sed diro ferri reuocantur amore
ductorisque metu.
He had spoken; but the doubtful crowd murmured together with indistinct sound. pietas and their ancestral gods divided even minds savage with slaughter and proud in spirit; but they are recalled by dire love of the sword and fear of their leader
Once again, we see indecision arising from divided loyalty. It is the tribune Laelius who resolves the soldiers’ hesitation, redefining pietas as fidelity to Caesar alone (BCiv. 1.374–8):
‘per signa decem felicia castris
perque tuos iuro quocumque ex hoste triumphos,
pectore si fratris gladium iuguloque parentis
condere me iubeas plenaeque in uiscera partu
coniugis, inuita peragam tamen omnia dextra …’
‘By ten victorious campaigns, I swear, and by your triumphs over every foe, if you bid me bury my sword in the throat of brother or parent, or into the entrails of my wife swollen with child, I would do even with unwilling hand …’
Laelius grants Caesar the authority to designate the Roman community, and hence the object of pietas.Footnote 79 Meleager likewise resolves the crew’s conflicting loyalties, but in a way that suggests that he too is willing to cross lines of piety in the pursuit of glory. Just like Laelius’ audience, Meleager’s companions initially feel torn between Hercules and their mission and thus find relief in his proposal that true loyalty lies — paradoxically — in abandoning their lost comrade. Meleager’s commitment to duty thus overshoots the Aeneid and lands in the world of the Bellum Ciuile, hinting at the story’s new direction.Footnote 80
In reply, Telamon warns the Argonauts that they will recognise only too late what they have lost (V.F. 3.697–714):
‘quis terris pro Iuppiter’ inquit ‘Achaeis
iste dies! saeui capient quae gaudia Colchi!
non hi tum flatus, non ista superbia dictis,
litore cum patrio, iam uela petentibus austris
cunctus ad Alciden uersus fauor …
iamne animis, iam[ne] gente pares? …
saepe metu, saepe in tenui discrimine rerum
Herculeas iam serus opes spretique uocabis
arma uiri nec nos tumida haec tum dicta iuuabunt.’
‘By Jupiter,’ he says, ‘what a day for the Achaean lands, what joys the cruel Colchians now win! These boasts, this arrogant speech, was not then heard, when on our fathers’ shore, when as the south winds sought the sails all favour turned to Alcides … Now are you equal in courage, in birth? … often in fear, often in the closest contest of your fortunes will you call upon Hercules’ aid, now too late, and the weapons of the forsaken man, nor will these arrogant words then please us.’
Telamon’s accusation of superbia anticipates the dangers of Meleager’s — and the crew’s — Herculean role-playing, while the repetition ipse … ipse underscores Hercules’ singularity in direct response to Meleager’s claim of Herculean strength for the crew as a whole. Meanwhile, Telamon’s rebuke iamne animis, iam[ne] gente pares? echoes the sentiments expressed by Neptune in response to the storm in Aeneid 1: tantane uos generis tenuit fiducia uestri? (Aen. 1.132: ‘Does such confidence in your ancestry now seize you?’). It is now Meleager, it seems, who aligns more closely with the disruptive winds. And by sailing off without Hercules, it is Meleager who now destroys the material of Vergilian epic, replacing Hercules’ arma uiri with his own empty (tumida) words — the substitution to which Jupiter objects in the lines with which we began (V.F. 4.11; Introduction, above).Footnote 81
As Manuwald points out, Telamon’s Iliadic reference to ‘Achaean lands’ anticipates the far-reaching consequences of Hercules’ abandonment: without his strength, Jason will be forced to rely on Medea for help, and her escape with him to Greece will spark the chain of events that culminates in the Trojan War. The Argonauts’ over-assessment of their own abilities — ista superbia — thus leads well beyond the tragedy that awaits Jason. Indeed, through this allusion we circle back to Epod. 13, to the exemplary role played by Meleager for Homer’s Achilles. The dangerous game of heroic competition begins, Valerius suggests, on this first epic voyage.
VIII Conclusion
In sum, Valerius responds to Vergil’s celebration of pietas and fides by exposing the gap between language and action. In their contest over the right to define the proper objects of loyalty (and how that loyalty should manifest in action), Telamon and Meleager stage in miniature the rhetorical competition over Rome’s ethical inheritance and political imprimatur. The debate over Hercules’ abandonment shows how Vergilian language can be made to tell two very different stories, how the rhetorics of pietas and imitatio — political, literary, heroic — might (re)create instability rather than order. On the one hand, the pietas represented by Telamon threatens the epic’s forward momentum. On the other, while both Hercules and Meleager define arma uirumque through a Vergilian fusion of duty owed to family and mission, Meleager’s Caesarian overtones — and his own history of kin-killing — suggest that his re-start of the epic rests on misguided pietas. What type of arma uirumque, then, will the Argonautica turn out to be?
The Argonautic myth provided an apt vehicle for interrogating Rome’s corporate mythology. Simultaneously a story of progress and decline, in the Roman tradition it marked the end of the Golden Age and beginning of the Iron — a turning point from Saturnian ease to Jovian labor. Such activity was the catalyst of both the spread of civilisation and, following Catullus 64, of a new age of moral decay.Footnote 82 As such, Valerius’ celebration of the Argonauts’ voyage in tandem with the Flavians’ outward-looking rhetoric of expansion challenged his Roman readers to reconsider their ideological interpretation of current events. In Zissos’ words, the Argonautica ‘unfolds as an ongoing process of reception that gains its own vitality from its constant reworking and reappraisal of the narrative content of its models.’Footnote 83 In the context of the profound ambivalence surrounding the Argo’s role in mythological history, Valerius exploits the tensions between progress and regress — duty to the future and to the past — and between personal and public loyalties to reassess rhetorics of political legitimacy.
With so much at stake, Valerius’ focus on language constitutes an intervention on the literary tradition of imperial mythmaking, of politicised epic as political act. I suggest that Valerius looks back to Vergil’s Augustan programme through the lens of Lucan’s fractured loyalties to show how the rhetoric of the exemplary hero/emperor could not translate into different political landscapes without undermining its own semantic value.
One last Horatian echo suggests the way forward for this backwards-looking problem. In Epodes 7, Horace represents civil war as Rome’s ancestral scelus (Epod. 7.17–20):Footnote 84
acerba fata Romanos agunt
scelusque fraternae necis,
ut inmerentis fluxit in terram Remi
sacer nepotibus cruor.
Bitter fates and the sin of fraternal slaughter drive the Romans on, when the blood of innocent Remus — a curse to his grandsons — flowed out onto the earth.
In Valerius’ post-Lucanian world, the object of civic pietas was nebulous. Within the Argonauts’ outward-looking quest are the seeds of Rome’s implosive present in Valerius’ heroes’ display of fidelity to their epic models and — perhaps — in their Flavian emperors’ Augustan rhetorics of restoration and renewal.
Much as Hercules’ civilising career had left him no opponent but himself, so too did Rome’s imperial expansion raise the disquieting possibility that it would turn its aggression inward.Footnote 85 Meleager’s Lucanian display of pietas to Hercules activates the self-destructive tendencies both of his heroic exemplum and of the civic-adjacent conflicts of the Aeneid, ultimately setting in motion the narrative of decline built into Jupiter’s Argonautic fatum. Through the lens of the Bellum Ciuile, Valerius shows how Augustan language — and the Roman future it helps create — may be assembled not into the definitive arma uirumque of the Roman nation, but into civil war.
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